My phone screen was the only source of light in the nursery, casting an eerie blue glow over Twin A's aggressively snotty face at fourteen minutes past three in the morning. I was trapped in that specific, hallucinatory layer of sleep deprivation where your brain simply surrenders its critical thinking skills and accepts absolutely any information presented to it as undeniable historical fact. Which is exactly how I found myself staring at a poorly photoshopped, heavily pixelated thumbnail image of the greatest gymnast in human history holding an infant in a bedazzled leotard, genuinely wondering how I had missed such a colossal piece of global news.
I shifted my weight, trying to stop my knee from clicking and waking the child who had just spent the last two hours screaming about the structural integrity of her favourite dummy, and clicked the link. The article was a masterpiece of terrible internet clickbait, clearly written by a confused algorithm that had scraped the bottom of the celebrity gossip barrel. It boldly claimed that the Olympic champion had secretly given birth to a daughter named Adria in August of last year. I blinked at my phone through the crust of exhaustion, vaguely remembering from a late-night Wikipedia spiral during the Tokyo Olympics that Adria is actually the name of her adult younger sister. The internet is a weird, lawless swamp, especially when you're running on three hours of fractured sleep and the lingering fumes of yesterday's tepid instant coffee.
Falling for terrible artificial intelligence at three in the morning
So to clear up the confusion that apparently plagues desperate parents doomscrolling in the dark: no, she hasn't given birth. As of right now, the most decorated gymnast to ever walk the earth doesn't have a baby of her own. She is married to an American football player, and while they've vaguely mentioned wanting kids someday, her current focus seems to be defying the laws of physics and collecting gold medals in Paris like the rest of us collect reusable shopping bags we inevitably forget to take into the supermarket.
The entire source of this bizarre internet confusion stems from the existence of a tiny, extremely photogenic human affectionately dubbed 'Baby Biles' by the internet. This is Ronni Louise Biles, born in late 2022 to the gymnast's older brother Ronald and his wife Samantha. Ronni is a frequent, delightful fixture on social media, often spotted in the stands at elite gymnastics competitions wearing miniature, custom-made replicas of those incredibly sparkly GK Elite leotards. And honestly, looking at photos of this aunt-and-niece duo makes me weirdly emotional, though to be fair, in my current state, I recently teared up watching a pigeon eat a discarded chip outside the Tube station.
My health visitor mumbled something during our six-month checkup about children needing strong attachments outside their primary caregivers to develop properly, which I'm fairly certain was just her polite, medically sanctioned way of saying my daughters were absolutely sick to the back teeth of looking at my exhausted, unwashed face all day. But she had a point about the village. We talk endlessly about 'the village' in parenting circles, usually while desperately wishing someone from said village would show up and fold our laundry.
The unsung heroes of the modern family tree
This brings me to the actual hero of the modern family dynamic: the aunt. Aunts swoop in, smell like expensive perfume instead of dried sour milk and desperation, and buy the presents that actually look nice in your house. I'm notoriously rubbish at buying gifts. For the girls' first birthday, I found myself sitting on the living room floor at midnight, desperately trying to wrap a cardboard box in tin foil because I'd forgotten to buy wrapping paper and thought they might like the shiny texture.
My sister, on the other hand, understands the assignment. She showed up looking incredibly rested and handed over the Wooden Baby Gym | Nature Play Gym Set with Botanical Elements. I'll admit, I'm usually deeply sceptical of anything described by marketing departments as 'Montessori-aligned', because in my experience that usually just translates to 'incredibly beige, completely devoid of joy, and costs as much as a second-hand Vauxhall Corsa'.
But I've to eat my words because this thing is actually brilliant. It has these lovely wooden leaves and fabric moons that look like they belong in a trendy Scandinavian coffee shop, rather than being a glaring plastic eyesore that plays the same tinny, maddening rendition of 'Old MacDonald' until you want to throw it directly into the Thames. The first time we set it up, Twin B lay beneath it for a solid twenty-two minutes just batting at the textured beads. In twin time, twenty-two minutes of silent, independent play is roughly equivalent to a three-week luxury holiday in the Maldives. The organic materials are apparently great for their sensory development, or so my sister proudly informed me while drinking my last decent beer, but honestly, I just love it because it doesn't require batteries or make me want to rip my own ears off.
The sheer audacity of asking women when they plan to reproduce
What really gets under my skin about the whole fake baby rumour mill isn't just the shoddy journalism, it's the relentless, suffocating pressure society places on women the exact second they get married. Late last year, our favourite gymnast posted a completely innocuous photo of herself at a Green Bay Packers game to support her husband. Because the angle of the photo wasn't perfectly flat, the comment section immediately devolved into a chaotic chorus of people declaring her pregnant.
She really had to post a follow-up on Instagram telling everyone to respectfully back off, writing that she hated even having to address it but asking people to stop commenting on her body and assuming she was pregnant. It's a masterclass in boundary-setting, but it's infuriating that she even had to do it. My wife's obstetrician once casually noted during a checkup that the constant societal prying into a woman's uterus does absolute wonders for maternal anxiety, which is his very dry, medical way of saying it destroys it entirely and sends blood pressure through the roof.
I remember the absolute gauntlet of family gatherings my wife had to endure before we had the twins. You just sit there eating a lukewarm sausage roll while some distant relative you haven't seen since 2014 leans in and loudly asks when you're going to start a family, completely ignoring the messy, heartbreaking reality of fertility struggles, personal choices, or just the very valid fact that maybe someone is busy doing literally anything else with their life. And it doesn't even stop once you've them! You push out a human being, or in our case two human beings, surviving off three hours of sleep and cold toast, and someone's Great Aunt Susan at a christening is already demanding a sequel. It's like finishing a marathon with bleeding nipples and someone immediately asking if you're planning to run an ultramarathon next Tuesday.
Honestly, rather than asking women invasive questions about their reproductive timelines, perhaps we could all just collectively mind our own business, offer to hold a screaming toddler for five minutes so a mother can drink a hot cup of tea, and accept that some people are busy winning Olympic medals while the rest of us are just trying to figure out how to fold a complicated collapsible buggy without pinching our fingers.
Biology is honestly the least interesting part of a family tree
The irony of everyone obsessing over whether this incredible athlete has given birth is that her own life story is a massive, beautiful testament to the fact that biology is the absolute least important part of what makes a family. Because of her biological mother's severe struggles with addiction, she and her siblings ended up in the encourage care system when she was just three years old. A few years later, she and her younger sister were formally adopted by her maternal grandparents, Ron and Nellie.
She calls them Mum and Dad. She has explicitly said that if not for her parents and the adoption, she wouldn't be where she's today. I remember reading a crumbling pamphlet about the encourage care system in the waiting room of our GP's surgery once while waiting for the twins' endless round of immunisations. The numbers were staggering, hundreds of thousands of kids just waiting for a safe place to land. My sleep-addled brain couldn't quite process the scale of it then, and it still struggles now.
It makes you realise that a family isn't just a simple equation of shared DNA. A family is whoever shows up at two in the morning with a bottle of Calpol and a clean towel when the stomach bug hits. It's whoever stands in the rain to watch a terrible school nativity play. It's the people who choose you, day after day, even when you're acting like a tiny, irrational dictator who refuses to eat anything that isn't shaped like a dinosaur.
When the village tries to help but gets it slightly wrong
Of course, relying on your chosen family and the wider village does mean you occasionally have to accept their well-meaning but aesthetically questionable contributions to your home. Aunts and grandparents love to buy blankets. We have roughly four million blankets. My mother-in-law, who's a saint and frequently saves my sanity, bought us the Organic Cotton Baby Blanket Eco-Friendly Purple Deer Pattern. Now, I've to be honest here. The blanket itself is perfectly fine. It's made of lovely, GOTS-certified organic cotton, and the double-layer weight is genuinely brilliant for tucking around the girls in the pram when the London wind decides to turn aggressively hostile.
But the design is just... a lot. It's this intensely lively purple background covered in bright green Bambi-esque deer. When I'm staggering into the nursery at dawn, the sheer volume of purple and green happening on that fabric is genuinely startling to my retinas before I've had my morning coffee. The girls don't seem to mind it, probably because babies have terrible taste, but it definitely clashes violently with the muted, calming nursery vibe my wife spent six months carefully curating on Pinterest.
If you're an aunt, uncle, or grandparent looking to assert your dominance as the best gift-giver in the family, skip the purple deer and buy the Blue Fox in Forest Bamboo Baby Blanket instead. We received this one from a friend who clearly understands my aesthetic limits. It has this incredibly soothing, muted Scandinavian design that makes me feel like a much cooler, more put-together dad than I genuinely am. But more importantly, the bamboo fabric possesses some sort of mythical, temperature-regulating witchcraft that honestly stops my children from waking up drenched in sweat during those weird, sticky British heatwaves. It breathes beautifully, it washes like a dream, and the dark blue pattern is exceptionally good at hiding the suspicious, unidentifiable stains that inevitably plague every single item of clothing in our house.
Sleep-training manuals and parenting influencers will try to sell you a rigid blueprint for how your family should look, how your baby should sleep, and exactly when you should be having your next one. But page 47 of that manual usually just suggests you remain calm and trust the process, which I've found to be deeply unhelpful advice when you're covered in someone else's drool at a quarter to four in the morning. Build your village, ignore the intrusive questions, buy the nice bamboo blankets, and try not to believe everything you read on the internet at 3 AM.
The messy truth about the rumours (FAQ)
Did she seriously have a baby in secret?
No, she absolutely didn't. The internet is just full of terrible clickbait and weirdly aggressive AI-generated articles. The baby you see her holding in all those viral photos is her adorable niece, Ronni, who's officially living my dream life of being carried around by an Olympian while wearing custom sparkly outfits.
Why do people keep saying she's pregnant?
Because society has a massive, collective problem with minding its own business. She posted a photo of herself at an American football game wearing a normal outfit, and because her stomach wasn't entirely concave from that specific camera angle, thousands of people decided to diagnose her with a pregnancy. She had to publicly ask everyone to stop, which is exhausting and unfair.
Who are her actual parents?
She was adopted by her maternal grandparents, Ron and Nellie Biles, when she was six years old, after spending time in the encourage care system. She refers to them as her mum and dad, which is a brilliant reminder that biology doesn't dictate who your real parents are—it's the people who show up and do the hard work.
Are aunts really that important to a kid's development?
My GP mentioned something about secondary attachments and emotional security, but speaking from the trenches of twin parenting, aunts are vital because they possess the energy we lack. They act as a safe, fun adult who doesn't have to enforce the rules about eating vegetables, and they usually buy the best wooden toys that don't make horrific electronic noises.
What's the best thing to say when someone asks when you're having kids?
You have a few options. You can give a polite, vague answer about focusing on the present. You can change the subject. Or, my personal favourite, you can maintain unbroken, unblinking eye contact while slowly taking a bite of a biscuit until the silence becomes so physically uncomfortable that they make an excuse to leave the room. Your reproductive timeline is yours alone.
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